In life, all of us have missed many opportunities, which we feel would have improved and enhanced our current lives. There is hardly anyone who does not look back at some past incident or situation, where he or she wishes they had done differently. But is regretting the past a boon, for us to learn, or is it a bane, which only makes us miserable?
For every one person who genuinely learns from a past mistake or missed opportunity, there are nine others who don’t. For most of us, a good opportunity is known to be good only when we look back at it, after a lot of time has passed.
While a winner is one who can spot and act favourably when an opportunity arises, in the present tense, it would be safe to say that such winners are a rarity, and most of us would find ourselves in the ‘missed opportunity group’, by default.
Why do we miss good opportunities? Every time there is a choice, we try and employ all our resources to come to the right decision. These resources include our past experiences, our memory, our learning and knowledge, our education, our conditionings, the experiences of others, advice from our near and dear ones, expert advice from specialists in that particular field, and intuition.
While intuition is likely to be right more often than not, most of us have lost our ability to trust our intuitive abilities, often dismissing them as ‘wishful thinking’. These various resources listed above, by themselves, might actually give us the right choice, most of the time.
But the problem arises because all these resources—knowledge, education, experiences and advice---are fed into our mind, chewed, churned and ruminated upon, to such an extent that the whole thing often becomes a mass of confusion, and it becomes almost impossible for us to filter out a clear cut decision from this homogenous mass.
Adding to the problem of making the right choice, and seeing that a good opportunity is not missed, are our emotions. Fear, greed, stress, worry, anxiety, insecurity, jealousy, anger, irritability, public opinion, self esteem, pride---all these and more come into play, when we have to take a decision.
If it was a simple case of asking someone or relying on our previous experiences and making the correct choice, life would be so much easier. But we are always living against the background of these emotions, the two major ones which run our lives being fear and greed. And the list of missed opportunities is endless and unlimited.
Students who took science instead of joining the arts stream, parents who forced their children into careers which they thought was best for their child, the boy who agreed or did not agree to marry a particular girl (and vice versa), the couple who decided to have a child (or decided not to), the businessman who refused (or accepted) a particular contract, deal, or partnership, the trader who invested in the wrong stocks which went down, while the ones he avoided rose, the parents who did not stand by their children in times of crisis, children who abandoned their parents when they should not have, the middle aged executive who missed his annual health check up and was later discovered to be suffering from some serious condition, a doctor who did not ask for investigations in a patient, a patient who did not visit his doctor on time, someone who rejected a job offer only to realise later that the one who replaced him has gone on to become the managing director of the firm----the list is practically endless.
Should we rue missed opportunities? Actually, we don’t seem to have a choice. Our brain software is already pre-set to the ‘regret’ mode. We really don’t have to make an effort to regret or rue a past event. It comes automatically.
If the past experience serves as a learning experience for a future event, it’s good. If we are only going to wallow in self pity and remorse, it is only going to sap our energy, infuse us with a lot of negativity, and see to it that in the future too, we take wrong decisions.
The past, as we all know, cannot be changed. But we never stop thinking or saying “I wish I had done this” or “I wish I had listened/not listened to him/her”.
We feel, or our mind and ego feel that it was within our reach, within our control, to have made the right choice and we messed it up. While this may or may not be true in the physical sense, as far as the metaphysical is concerned, all of us come here with a pre-written script, which we call fate or destiny.
How much of it we can change with our efforts and how much we cannot, is a moot point and something that will never ever be known to us. We will never know whether the right choice we made was because of our destiny or hard work and planning, or whether the wrong choice we made was because of our destiny or our shoddy planning and confusions.
This question, in all probability, will remain unanswered. In such circumstances, it might be a good idea to trust one’s fate completely, do what one has to do, and forget the consequences as something beyond one’s control, stop regretting and get on with our remaining lives.
Article Written by P V Vaidyanathan